Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!husc6!rice!cathyf
From: cathyf@Rice.EDU (Catherine A. Foulston)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: B news duplicate articles
Summary: Why isn't stuff staying in my history file?
Keywords: expire, history, B news, duplicate
Message-ID: <413@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 3 Aug 89 05:45:34 GMT
Sender: root@rice.edu
Reply-To: cathyf@rice.edu
Followup-To: news.software.b
Organization: Rice University, Houston, Texas
Lines: 32

Help!  As many people have observed in news.admin, a bunch of old
articles got dumped out on the net.  I don't understand why the
history mechanism is not causing these articles to be rejected.

o I am running B News 2.11 patchlevel 17 and nntp 1.5.5.
o I am running expire nightly and rebuilding once a week.  Articles
  are supposed to stay around for 2 weeks or less depending on the
  newsgroup.  History is supposed to be retained for 30 days for
  ALL articles.  At least this is what I think I am doing with expire.
  Maybe I don't understand it.  What options am I supposed to give
  expire to make it do this?
o I recently converted from the old usg-style history to using ndbm.
  At that time I *completely* rebuilt the history file from scratch.

o There are two copies of most of the duplicates in the directory.
  Doing a diff on them shows that only the path is different.
o Only the LATER of the two copies appears in the history file.

o Most recently the problem has been with the large batch of old news
  that everybody got that was dated July 22.  But I have had this
  problem before (even before I converted to ndbm).

Maybe I just don't understand how expire or history are supposed to
work.  If anyone can explain this to me or suggest possible sources
of this problem, I would appreciate it greatly.  Many thanks in
advance.  (P.S:  I already RTFM--I guess I don't understand it.)

regards,

cathy :)     As usual, email replies are probably better than posts
Cathy Foulston   =||=   cathyf@rice.edu   =||=   {backbone?}!rice!cathyf
Disclaimer:  I'm a student--I don't even KNOW Rice University's opinion.